"I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t" by Sarah Jeong https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly
Great read, and this comment in a thread by her also hits home for me: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/990974005162094599
This is true! I proudly quit facebook, so now my wife keeps me posted about our family and friends. 😆
@nolan
@nolan What's interesting to me about the linked comment is not just the fact that women suffer from giving that emotional labor, but men are shortchanged by having it done for them.
There's a crisis of men who can't maintain the social relationships they need to thrive in life, and toxic masculinity is part to blame--but being insulated from emotional labor and developing the emotional maturity needed to maintain friendships can't be helping.
@starbreaker @nolan It's gonna be tough to teach kids emotional maturity of this kind, but it's worth it.
@starbreaker @zigg @nolan oh man, this is part of what terrifies me about raising my kids. I'm terrible at being social, making friends... how am I supposed to teach my kids?!?
@starbreaker @zigg @nolan This article really clarified the difficulty I have with leaving Facebook though. It really has replaced a skill that we used to have to practice regularly. I found myself trying to find some of my kids' friends' parents on Facebook the other day so I wouldn't have to ask for numbers and text them.
And then realized I was being ridiculous.
So I'm not quitting Facebook, but I am trying to cultivate friendships outside of it.
Don't ask me. I'm practically antisocial, and I don't have kids.
(It's not that I dislike children, but you gotta cook 'em right.)
@Einahpets I think that maybe raising them in an environment free of toxic masculinity is a great start... free to feel and free to wonder how their friends may be feeling.
But I know what you mean... I don't think to ask my _own_ friends how they are sometimes, stay connected one-on-one, how am I going to remember to teach my kids to?
We do the best we can as parents, ultimately, and hope that it's enough. 😊
@nolan Damn that comment is true.
@nolan it's interesting to see how other people engage with leaving social media. I felt like a weight was lifted when I left a few years back. I feel like people are experiencing an anxiety of disconnection with social media, but they are rationalizing it as something else (because disconnection is tricky to talk about). I wonder at the depth of a friendship when not using a particular app jeopardizes it.
@toilettrouble It felt like a weight was lifted for me as well, although I admit it's harder to keep up with family and close friends now that I'm off Facebook. (And thus those friends became less close…)
But I think the author is right that the blame falls partly on my shoulders since I (like many men) don't put much work into maintaining social relationships. I have never written a Christmas card.
@nolan yeah, i think maintaining social relationships is a skill that men just aren't expected to learn, because boys are taught that their moms will take care of everything, and girls are taught to take care of boys... at least in a wide brushstroke look at western culture
i feel like social relationships should be maintained organically though... it's impossible to be deeply connected to more than a handful of people; we just don't have enough time or emotional energy to cultivate that depth
@nolan Like, I wanna send a Christmas card because I'm inspired and excited to wish my friends and family a merry Christmas, not because of a social, cultural obligation to do so. So maybe it means having small, tight-knit friend groups where you don't send a card because you are all hanging out together for every holiday already.
I wonder also if people are scared to admit just how dependent on it they really are
@nolan
@jerry @nolan In my personal experience people LOVE admitting how addicted to Facebook they are.... it's like caffeine; there's a positive cultural regard around dependency. I agree that fear is still there, but I'm wondering if it might be a fear of loneliness/disconnection... that's certainly what it was for me. Maybe we are both saying the same things, actually.
I've had people try to contact me via my wife's Facebook account because I quit and she didn't.
When this happens, I ask my wife to let me borrow her device and write something like this:
"This is Matthew, using Catherine's account. I have a website and a publicly accessible email address. Stop trying to reach me through my wife. She is not my secretary, and she's even less interested in your bullshit than I am."
@nolan emotion work is the phrase that makes more sense in this context. emotional labor was a phrase coined to specifically refer to emotion regulation required by service workers, especially women of color in service jobs. emotional labor is done in exchange for a wage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor
@nolan I liked the note at the bottom about the p2p distributed social network everyone owns: the contacts list on your phone, because Signal exactly describes itself that way—see "Social software needs a social graph" section at https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
There are so many possibilities to social media beyond Facebook's approach that we haven't explored… Mastodon and the broader ActivityPub ecosystem are quickly exploring that space, but alas, lock-in probably means that the best won't win…
"I missed big personal news from people I knew. I missed dance parties and house parties and casual get-togethers. I was the last to find out about births and the last to see baby pictures."
I'd argue that friends who don't tell you about their "big news" when you're not on facebook aren't really your friends and therefore not a good reason to keep having an account there.
@nolan good article. thanks for sharing :)
> I missed big personal news from people I knew. I missed dance parties and house parties and casual get-togethers. [...]
i found this happened to me before i even left facebook, due to feed changes that prioritized some folks over others based on my interactions. i lost touch with people because the machine had dismissed our connection for generating insufficient artifacts.
@nolan This is such a great summary of everything I hate about facebook!
@nolan jeong does good work, and "facebook is powerful because it automates emotional labor" is a pretty interesting read on things.
of course none of this makes me feel like a facebook should be allowed to continue existing.
@nolan definitely a good read, especially for someone like me who never really invested time into FB and only amassed around 70 friends before trimming it down and ultimately deleting it.
Leaving it was easy for me (I even did it before it was cool!), but apparently not so much for people who once invested heavily into it or have partners or close family who have done so.